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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

For those reading this site that don’t know Dr. Robert Rowley, you should. He’s the original Chief Medical Officer (CMO) at Practice Fusion that recently parted ways with Practice Fusion to work on some other projects along with still practicing medicine. Along with this background, he’s a really smart guy that has a lot of knowledge about the EMR and EHR industry. Plus, he’s a downright nice guy.

The good thing is that he got addicted to blogging while working at Practice Fusion and now he’s carried over that love to his own blog (linked above). I’m sure I’ll be referencing Dr. Rowley and his blog many more times in the future. The title of this post came from a blog post he wrote about Mass Consolidation of EHR software. Here’s a quote from that post:

If one carries out a detailed analysis of 2011 Meaningful Use data, some patterns emerge. Firstly, ambulatory clinicians nearly always choose Complete EHRs – 95% of ambulatory Meaningful Use attestations were done using Complete EHRs. Hospitals, on the other hand, represent a different pattern – only 48% of hospitals attested for Meaningful Use using a Complete EHR, whereas 52% used Modular EHR components.

I found this to be a really interesting observation. It’s not all that surprising when you think about it, but it’s very interesting.

I know there’s a strong group of people that participate in the Collaborative Health Consortium that have been proponents of using modular EHR components. It looks like this is definitely happening in the hospital environment. I think that’s a very good thing.

What do people think of Practice Fusion? Is it certified? I’m wondering if it would be a good choice for an allergist in a sole practice with 2 locations, someone who is definitely not a techie. She’s very worried about privacy, can’t spend a fortune, doesn’t want to turn her office into a computer room.

While I’m asking, I know that one can use it as ad supported, or far what seems a fairly small fee per doctor per month? Any thoughts on that?

Practice Fusion is certified for Meaningful Use and we’ve helped medical professionals earn over $40M in incentives already. You’re right that you have a choice between free or $100/month for a version without ads. You’re welcome to create a free account online to see if it is a good match for the allergy practice

I actually signed up for a practice account last night, and after some hours working it sent a bunch of specific questions to the ‘community’ email address at PracticeFusion.com. There is a lot to like there. In particular, for the most part it is very easy to use, and ought to require very little if any formal training for many people.

About the only thing I didn’t like was how, when you go for help, it covers up your session (a separate tab or window would work a lot better) so you can’t switch back and forth to and from HELP. And I’m guessing this shouldn’t be too hard to fix.

I imagine it will take a few days for someone to get back to me with answers to all my questions. But it is already clear that this is a very nice system. And while I can’t say that the needs of allergists are all that complex, it seemed to handle them well. The SOAP notes seemed to ME (I’m an IT guy, not a doctor) to cover most of what was needed. I did ask in my email some detailed questions about ePrescribe since there’s no way for me to properly check that out.

Question; I gather that PF is built using Flash; Flash is going away. I’m assuming that it will eventually be rewritten in HTML5?

One other thing I did not notice or ask about; ‘Decision Support’. Is there anything like this in PF at this time?

That’s good to hear. (Decision support and Flash). I don’t need a call from an AM, just an email response. But if and when the doctor in question is ready to proceed, I know she’ll have more questions, and then we’d arrange a call.

As to the CC program, yes, I do know about it. We’re not likely to import someone to our area on Long Island (but there were one or two in the NYC area, which is good). And at some point I might try to enter that program along with a few other people.

R Troy,
I’ve written quite a bit about Practice Fusion over the years. Ever since Emily first sent me the “Free EHR” press release way back when. You can see my posts: http://www.emrandhipaa.com/tag/practice-fusion/ If you click the next page at the bottom you’ll find more. I’ve even done some pretty in depth reviews in the past. Hopefully you find them helpful.

Free EMR Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
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